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Focusing on the Most Pressing Projects Together with My Virtual Assistant

by Francis
(January 06, 2013)

My job search has come to an end. Now, it’s time to re-organize myself with my Virtual Assistant. Before, I had a few hours a day to get projects organized with my VA. Now, time is more than scarce.

But that isn’t really a problem. Since one of the biggest factors of the success of a website is time, meaning that a site needs to mature to be successful, it’s good that I can’t give my VA tons of input every day.

To be honest, he has more than enough on his plate to work through the to-do list I’m leaving him every weekend.

But it has helped that he has changed from daily updates to 3 updates a week. Also, his work updates include screenshots, links and all sort of information that makes it easier for me to follow up faster.

Also check out this link about when I set up the communication with a team member.

The most important task now, for both me and my VA, is to prioritize. This way, we will get more done than if we were working on thousand projects at the same time, without finishing one for good.

Comments for Focusing on the most pressing projects together with my Virtual Assistant

Sep 11, 2014 Reap what you Sow..
by: JomvieAs your website matures—time is of the essence. And I think that’s a good feedback because it only means that it is growing and that you have to keep up with your website’s needs.And the good thing is you have a team of VAs to help you around..

We Want You to Learn From Our Experiences of Cooperating With A VA

by Francis
(January 18, 2013)

Picture editing with picmonkey ebook

From the past, all I did with my VA was to get my work done. Now, I want to change my focus.

In order for you to learn as much as possible, I’m always asking my virtual assistant to put up a sort of mini manual from each step we have learned.

Look out for those free downloads. All we ask you for it is a short vote of confidence.

Whenever my virtual assistant learns something, he will put the things learned together in a mini manual. You can really do it yourself or you can simply send it to your virtual assistant.

After he will have reviewed the manual, he will have acquired the same skills as my virtual assistant has.

I hope this is a great deal.

 

With My Virtual Assistant I Finally Got the Projects Done With the Detail I Would Like To

by Francis
(January 21, 2013)

man with thumbs up

When I returned from work, my VA has already worked for 5 hours. He has completed a few projects of mine on both of my websites with a lot of attention to detail.

When I remember the times when I worked on my websites alone without a virtual assistant, I was not as thorough as my assistant.

Not even by far.

That’s the cool thing about working with my VA. He implements my ideas and instructions not only to the letter but with creative attention to detail.

Sometimes, he implements ideas I wouldn’t even have had without me asking. That’s extremely helpful.

A lot of little details that you would only discover when they were not taken care of are laid off very well on my websites.

Great stuff! That’s what I love to see when I came back after a long day of work.

 

Speeding Up the Communication with My Virtual Assistant by Using More Informative Work Updates

by Francis
(January 22, 2013)

man working on his laptop with mutliple complexed screenshots

I’m happy to have started my new job. As expected, it takes a lot of time from me. Luckily, my virtual assistant and I have prepared extensively for the situation.

Now, it’s time for the hardcore test.

I work much more than the classical 9 to 5. If I’m still successful in keeping two online businesses running then great!

If I give up on both websites, please come over to my house and kick me in the butt.

Just kidding!

If I cannot keep up, then as a full time employee, this would prove that we have nothing to do with a virtual assistant.

Let’s hope that it doesn’t come to that.

I have a long discussion today with my virtual assistant about how to improve the speed of his work updates. I’ve asked him to invest much more time in updating me about his work.

The more clearly he can illustrate and present his progress, the faster I can react and give him input.

Each saved minute in my end helps.

In other words, even if my virtual assistant will need more than an hour to formulate a well-presented work update; it might be worth it if I have only 10 minutes a day to spare.

Do you get this principle?

If your time is worth a lot of money it makes sense to invest that money in working time from your virtual assistant even if he’s only updating you about his progress.

I’ll keep you informed how this works for me.

 

Upcoming Interview with Successful Online Business Owner

by Francis
(January 27, 2013)

Ever wanted to meet someone that lives the online biz lifestyle – with great success? Even while working on a day job at the same time…?

Then now is the chance to secure yourself a seat in the front row!

A new series of Question and Answers Interviews, called “Meet an SBIer” is starting in 2013.

On January 31, 6 pm ET you’ll be able to see Carl Trent, owner of dadsguidetowdw.com, live on YouTube!

He’ll be talking from experience about:

    1. Targeting your audience with the right “voice”
    2. Monetization of your online business
    3. Keyword Research for successful web pages

Become part of this interview and ask your questions beforehand on Sitesell’s Facebook page.

Stay tuned to this Facebook page to know about the exact location where the interview will be released: on the day of the event, the exclusive interview will be posted there!

In the meantime, please also enjoy Jill, who also turned her passion into a way to leave the day job rat-race:

My Virtual Assistant Helped Me Resolve Traffic Loss Problems with Penguin

by Francis
(January 29, 2013)

girl pointing towards her left

If you own a website and follow the actual trends with Google algorithms then you will know about the Penguin update.

In principle, the problem was that on my other site, I lost some traffic because I involved some less than optimal link-building techniques.

Fortunately, I could retrace whatever I did at that time and asked my virtual assistant to help me sort that out.

Probably many webmasters have the same problem. Some link-building techniques were more popular than others. But after Penguin, some of those techniques are punished with traffic loss.

What did my virtual assistant do?

He helped me locate where I used a certain technique too much and helped me reverse the process. Hopefully the next time a Google algorithm update comes along, my other website will regain some of its lost traffic.

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Merger of oDesk and Elance decided for in 4 month – Good or bad for employers and virtual assistants?

by Francis
(January 06, 2013)

Elance and Odesk plan to merge. How will they call themselves? oLance or Edesk...?
Elance and Odesk plan to merge. How will they call themselves? oLance or Edesk…?

As a regular user of the outsourcing service oDesk, I was surprised to read about its merging with its biggest competitor, Elance. This is quite big news that resonated strongly with their respective communities.

The New York Times reported this decision between these two service providers on the 18th December. The merger is planned to be effective for in about 3 month (official statement: in the first quarter of 2014)

The CEOs of both companies, Gary Swart (oDesk, click for the official statement) and Fabio Rosati (Elance, click for their statement), state that this merger was not a necessity out of lack of funding, but simply to improve both services by sharing their tools and expertise.

However, I believe this will definitively come with some re-organization (read: some people might be out of a job) as well as with some unexpected changes.

Just for an example: if Thomas Layton (oDesk) will become the executive chairman of both companies, what happens with the former executive chairman from Elance?

But I can understand that in order to stay in business, globally, these companies must make business decisions.

What is good and what is bad about this merger?

If you take the time to review the comments of the user base, you will find the following worries and a few positive reactions:

First, the positive reactions:

  1. If they combine the escrow system from Elance with the fixed price projects from oDesk, there would be more security for the VAs doing fixed price projects.
  2. Instead of wasting resources fighting each other, both competitors can now invest more into making the services even better.

However, the negative reactions outweigh the positive by far. Here are some points of criticism from users of both services:

  1. A very valid concern, that I also support, is that less competition (or even monopoly) is bad for the quality of the services. It will stand to be proven in the future how the services will really change.
  2. Some VAs are afraid that their hard worked on profiles might change somehow. But for now, it is planned that both services continue to co-exist, with profiles, payment methods, platform usage and feedback rates unchanged. At least that is what can be read in the official statements.
  3. In the opinion of some users, there seem to be more scammers on Elance. In others, people state that the users of oDesk are lowballing the prices. Other commenters claim that Elance has a better reputation than oDesk among freelancers, and that this merger will injure the reputation from Elance. Especially the fear of the market becoming “cheaper” is very visible among comments from users.These general opinions are not confirmed by me, but the general worries are that whichever service has the less honest users will pollute the other.
  4. Some users are afraid that an apparent business principle of Elance, focussing on lowering bids and increasing fees, might be ported to the other platform.
  5. Finally, some freelancers, especially in the comments of the oDesk statement, take the opportunity to appeal against unfair bannings and suspensions against them. Interestingly, some official answers looking into the case are given. Perhaps because the mods need to take care of appearances.Anyways, if you feel you might have been treated unfairly, it might be a good idea to appeal publicly on these posts?

Generally speaking, underpricing yourself is not something you should do, even if you feel pressured to do so. It’s a question of principles.

Is this merger good or bad business?

But will these decisions be good or bad for employers and virtual assistants alike? As an active oDesk user, my opinion is not easily impartial. But I have found a great critic from geekpreneur.com supporting the opinion that virtual assistants (the providers) should be worried about this merger.

Both services try to reassure, but only time will tell what will happen

For anyone, here are the reactions of both services to the complaints and worries voiced above (here and here). However, the statements feel a bit lukewarm to me.

The biggest worry is clearly the cost structure and the fear of fee increases due to this merger. Both outsourcing services insist that nothing will change to this regard.

But take a look at their words, stated like a politician. If you look closely, there’s a “legal” loophole:

The CEO of oDesk, Gary Swart, states that there will be

“No increase in fee based on the merger.”

In other words, whenever these two merged companies can find another reason (to cover expenses, due to the economy, because it is “unavoidable”) they might still increase fees…

A commenter observed this well, and I put a screenshot of his comment into an illustration on top of this post.

What is your opinion about this change?

What do you think about this merger?

Will it be beneficial? If yes, for whom (employers or VAs)? And if not, why?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

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How to Create a Manual Table of Contents That Adds Value And Traffic to Your SBI Homepage

by Francis
(January 02, 2013)

how-to-create-a-manual-table-of-contents-that-adds-value-and-traffic-to-your-sbi-homepage-21694242

You know that you can simply take the Table of Content SBI block, and add it to your homepage, right? This works really well.

As your site gets older and bigger, it can make sense to make the table of contents manually. This way you can:

  • Prevent keyword stuffing.
  • Add additional content to your website.
  • Add long tail keywords to your website.
  • Add navigational thumbnails to the page.

All of these actions will lead to increase traffic and I have used it for the homepage of Ideal-helper.com as well as for my other SBI sites.

How to Do It

  1. Get an inventory of all your Tier 2 pages.
  2. Detect one picture of each Tier 2 page that you want to use as a navigational thumbnail.
  3. Create a title and a good description text block with some additional information about what the Tier 2 page is all about.
  4. Order all your Tier 2 pages in a logical order.
  5. And then, create your Table of Contents manually.

Each time you add an additional Tier 2 page, you need to update your manual Table of Contents or else your tier navigation will be screwed up.

How I Outsourced All of This to My Virtual Assistant

My virtual assistant is very SBI savvy so instructions don’t take long anymore. I simply recorded a series of screen recordings with a video, looked at my Table of Content that is automatically generated by SBI and recorded audio transcription files with new content for each Tier 2 page.

My VA transcribed it, formatted the transcript with the thumbnails and created a manual Table of Contents.

In addition, you or your VA can research long-tail keywords from SBI’s search engine headquarters. Actually, this is the perfect time to do it. A manual table of content has added at least a thousand words to my homepages. This leads to a lot of additional long-tail searches.

Why not use the long-tail keywords from the search engine headquarters to beef up your homepage a little bit?

Either research each keyword yourself or ask your virtual assistant to do it. This is just one small but very fundamental task that my VA has helped me with.

Do you have questions to this project or more ideas that a virtual assistant could help you with your SBI site? If yes, just join us in the comments.

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Hiring a Virtual Assistant

by Kirk

If you’re drowning with tasks and you don’t know how to get things done, one of the best things to do is to hire a virtual assistant.

It could help you save time and allows you to stay focus on important tasks.

When hiring a virtual assistant you need to screen them first even you acquire them on legit sites like Staff.com and Guru.com, which allows you see their potential.

Having a virtual assistant is a great benefit for your business as long as you know how to find the right person for the job.

Thanks for your story, Kirk!

I also think that selection and training of the virtual assistant is the most crucial step to take, in order to be successful.

If you hire anyone who is willing to work for you, you’ll be in for a harsh ride. Believe me, I have been there, done that and gotten the t-shirt.

A good way to pre-screen an assistant is to hire two VA’s at the same time, assessing them and keeping the person who is the better fit to your business.

Your working style is as variable as there are personalities under the VA’s.

Personally, I found it important to relate to my VA’s as a real person. That’s why I’m interested in working with “nice, human” VA’s rather than professionals.

If you’re the CEO of a big online enterprise, you might need the exact opposite…

Bottom line:

Before you drown in your work and start to despair – get a virtual assistant!

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Working with a Provider with Very Low Computer Knowledge and Skills

by Virtual Assistant
(December 21, 2012)

Some days ago, I and Francis have hired a provider, ‘M.A’ (Original name not disclosed). As you are already aware of, we have hired multiple providers for Francis’ outsourced job research project.

First we have hired a provider from Bangladesh, ‘Roman’:

  1. I set up initial communication between Francis and Roman,
  2. interviewed him via Skype,
  3. then opened a contract
  4. and hired him for this project.

Although I have already told him that this would be a time-sensitive project and he had to start working for us right away, we did not hear anything from him after hiring him.

Why doesn’t Roman write back after being hired?

As this was not a new experience for both me and Francis, I didn’t close the job opening. Instead, I reviewed and short listed another contractor who was also from the same country I belong to.

We were looking for someone to research Chemistry related organizations and companies in Munich, Germany within a specified radius. This new person wrote in his cover letter that he is not only a Chemistry student, but also has some German language knowledge.

Found the perfect research assistant…?

So apparently this person seemed to be the perfect candidate for this position, but in actual that was not the case. I have closely reviewed his profile and found out that he was currently working in a well-reputed firm and I evaluated that if his provided information is correct, he would be earning at least $1000 PM, which is a very handsome pay in my country (Pakistan).

On the flip side, he applied for $1.11/hr including oDesk fee for our job. So that was the only reason I really don’t want to hire him: for me he was over qualified.

I and Francis had a detailed discussion over this and finally agreed on the point that we will hire him for a limited contract of 5 hours per week and if he performs well, we will increase his quota.

Discussions via Skype took a long time

discussion-over-skype
Just a small parts of the tedious discussions my VA had with this provider

Before hiring him, I asked him to come online via Skype and discussed some important terms and conditions with him. He was totally new on oDesk and during this chat I came to know that his computer skills and literacy were very, very low and he even didn’t know about some of the basics of oDesk Team Room Application.

I experienced two really funny experiences with this provider:

His Internet connection was so slow due to…

As I realized that he has very low computer knowledge and skills, but still we were interested in his chemistry and German language skills, so I moved a step ahead and told him each and everything about the project. But his internet connection was so slow that it took hours to download the provided training videos.

In fact I told him to download these videos and then we will discuss it tomorrow.

The show begins…

The next day I didn’t hear anything from him and sent him a chat about the videos, after some time he replied that he was still waiting for videos to be downloaded. I asked him why it’s taking so long to download these videos and also asked the speed and details of his internet connection, but everything was good.

After an hour or two he told me that there is a notification in his icon-bar that the internet is out of coverage.

I asked him where wifi router of his internet connection is placed, and he replied ‘Downstairs’.

So that was the reason why he was not getting complete internet signal and was unable to download the training videos 😉

He was unable to click to the bookmark icons on Google maps because…

google-maps-screenshot
He was unable to open Google maps bookmark balloon

In fact, he was able to click those bookmarks on Google Maps but apparently they weren’t popping out their addresses.

Let me take you into the situation from an earlier time frame.

After he downloaded and watched all the training materials, as expected he was not sure what to do. So I tried to train him little more. I made helpful screen captures with text annotations with the help of free screen recording software ‘Jing’ and sent him so that he can understand what we want from him.

I wanted him to follow along my step by step instructions and implement them in real-time. Out of these many screen captures, one has a screenshot of Google maps showing some bookmark balloons and places.

I asked him to do the same practice I did in the screen capture, but there was a serious problem with him, he was not able to click and open these bookmarked balloons. I stayed with him for at least 30 good minutes and explained him different solutions, but all in vain.

After 30 to 40 minutes of intense efforts, I realized that this person was not browsing Google maps on his browser. In fact he was clicking at my screenshot and was trying to open bookmarked locations over there.

Finally it’s time to work on the project and deliver results

After I explained him each and every step of this project in detail and asked him to start his work for this project, he disappeared.

Those days I was also absent due to some domestic reasons, but I asked him two or three times about the project which he never replied.

After around 10 days I saw some activity within his work diary and noticed that he has worked on our project, as I told him that I would be away he reported directly to Francis instead me.

employer-contract-feedback
Final Rating and comment given after ending the contract

I was really not happy with his performance and especially with his work attitude so I recommend Francis to rate him low, but still he was more generous and gave him a rating more than I recommended.

2 weeks after ending his contract, I got an email from him that he was busy due to some PhD thesis, that’s why he couldn’t work. I didn’t reply back because I think he should have let us know about this especially when we have already told him that this was a time sensitive project.

So in my opinion if you don’t have a professional attitude towards your work, it doesn’t matter how skilled you are. In any field of life your attitude comes first and everything else comes after that.

I would love to hear your comments about my failed but interesting experience.

Comments for Working with a Provider with Very Low Computer Knowledge and Skills

Aug 08, 2014 self-discipline is a must
by: Francis Ever since I’ve been following this post, I had such a great time reading everything about it. I think this kind of job is not how great your titles are, how excellent you are in school.This kind of job is about talent and skill to adapt to the nature of the job. Although I know I have my own flaws, but I am learning and willing to be trained 😀

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Working on the Design of the Ideal-Helper Website

by Francis
(December 20, 2012)

A friend of mine had a lot of criticism to say about the design (comments are in German)

A few friends of mine are entrepreneurs. They know how websites are supposed to be built and also know a lot about marketing. I’m lucky to have their feedback regarding the layout, design and look and feel of the Ideal-helper website.

Personally, I’m most proud about the contents I am writing here. The written words you can read here are based on my personal experiences of working with virtual assistants from all around the world. In my opinion, the written content is the most useful stuff you can get from this website.

On one hand, it’s impossible for me to ignore the tons of feedback my entrepreneur friends give to me.

Their main concern?

How the layout of my website might scare off new visitors.

I like to believe that someone who is really interested in the topic will read past as an optimal design.

But on the other hand, why lose potential readers and friends?

Why not go the extra mile to reach out to an even larger audience?

That’s why there’s also some intensive testing, working and fine tuning going on behind the lines – all for the optical pleasure.

Is this necessary?

I believe so.

Is it the highest priority?

I don’t believe so.

My virtual assistant and I would put an extra hours to make sure that you will receive fresh and relevant content on an ongoing basis.

The design optimizations will take place over time.

But as long as I can profit from the feedback of my friends, I’ll try to do so.

So please don’t be surprised if you see some optical changes on the next few days (or weeks…).

I promise you all the information will stay here. I won’t take down any of my information.

I‘ll also try to be as transparent as I can be about the whole process. Perhaps, there’s a lesson to be learned here.

And to be honest, I believe that what you can learn here from me is rather unique on the web.

Since I’m a totally normal guy who’s working together with virtual assistants without even having a notable income – so I haven’t found much resources about this when I started out outsourcing.

That’s why I believe the information you can read here still is useful.

But I will make ends meet so that the information is not only useful and present it into a very appetizing matter.

Stay tuned.

Comments for Working on the Design of the Ideal-helper Website

Aug 12, 2014 Content is better than the layout
by: JomvieFor me, yes a good layout is only a plus point as a random reader. What is more important for me is the content in the page itself. Because layout doesn’t have to do with my research.What’s worst is, if the layout is not so good and the content is not so good..then that’s the worst thing the owner could ever have in this business. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with the layout 😀